I can remember the first time I read a Seamus Heaney poem. It was called ‘Punishment’ and it was part of a sequence he wrote out of the captivating experience of seeing photographs of ancient bodies that had been preserved in the boglands. It was strange and unforgettable, incredibly daring in what it was doing. It implied a connection between the body of a girl who had clearly been the victim of some kind of human sacrifice and the bodies of women who had been attacked in Northern Ireland for befriending British soldiers. Wider comparisons seemed to suggest themselves also: to collaborators in France at the time of the second world war, who were stripped or had their heads shaved or were tarred and feathered, scapegoats from the crimes of a whole society.

Little adultress,
before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.

I was 18 at the time, a student in UCD. The year was 1981 and the poem, although written a good while previously, seemed to speak for the times I was living in. It was the era of Ann Lovett, of the nightmarish story of the Kerry Babies, of my country’s bitter debates about abortion and divorce. The poem’s way of connecting an ancient ritual of degradation to the contemporary and rapidly changing country I knew seemed absolutely revolutionary, but it seemed so by accident. This is the genius of Seamus Heaney.

Then there were the beautifully crafted lyrics, the gorgeous evocations of countryside, the constant and delicate counterpointing of present and past. His first book was entitled Death of a Naturalist and he seemed uneasy about the idea of the old-fashioned poem in which everything in nature is good. He was no Ulster Wordsworth, warbling about daffodils. His work had a kind of impatience. But for all that, he had an accuracy of description no Irish poet of his generation has ever rivalled. To read him is to stand in the Irish rain, to know what it feels like to go wintering out through the fields. He doesn’t describe; he incarnates on the page. Yeats wrote that it is hard to know ‘the dancer from the dance’, perhaps echoing an old saying still current in Connemara, that a really great singer does not sing the song but allows himself to be sung by it, always. In the work of Seamus Heaney, the truth of that motto comes alive. You sometimes have the feeling he is simply revealing what is there, rather than conveying anything artificial through art. His poems have the sense that they grew on the page, like wildflowers sprouting out of a limestone outcrop in The Burren or rushes on a windswept strand.

And for me, Seamus Heaney is the spiritual inheritor of Patrick Kavanagh, not Yeats. He has Kavanagh’s innate sense of what is loved by the ordinary reader, the small, precious moments of everyday life that somehow clarify to us what we are actually are. Not for nothing does every book of Heaney’s regularly top the Irish bestsellers’ list. He is that rarest of creatures: a poet whose work is widely beloved, garlanded with literary awards from critics and academics all over the world, but simultaneously read in every Irish home where poetry is even slightly valued. His poems zero in on events other poets wouldn’t notice: a boy watching his mother peeling potatoes by a sink, an old man meeting a friend with whom he once went to school, a son driving his father to confession, a bricklayer at work, the small rites and observances by which lives are lived in Ireland, the ways in which we speak to one another, or fail to. Like Austin Clarke or Thomas Kinsella, like Paul Durcan and Derek Mahon, and like the great Paul Muldoon, his brilliant fellow Ulsterman, he has taken the realities of this tiny island on the western outpost of Europe and found in them truths that have touched people everywhere.

In other ways, he reminds me of an ancient Irish bard, a druid who knows the secret rhythms and rhymes of his tribe, the underground water of his community. His line ‘Whatever you say, say nothing’ is perhaps the most achingly sad and toughly accurate reflection of Northern Ireland’s tragedies and evasions. And yet his observation that there are instances ‘when hope and history rhyme’ has been quoted from the halls of Stormont to the lawns of the White House, an intimation of what is truly best in us, a kind of acknowledgement of a people who have always deserved better than the hatreds in which they have struggled. His work contains constant echoes of the earlier Irish poets and he stands in that great tradition that stretches back so far into the past that we know almost nothing of its anonymous geniuses. We will never know who wrote something at staunch and powerful as ‘The Rocks of Bawn’ or ‘I Wish I Was in Carrickfergus’ but Heaney’s scrupulous sense of place and getting the details right places him in the company of that extraordinary pantheon. Yet, he has been no narrow or purely local intelligence. While he has proved himself a magnificent capable translator of ancient Irish texts, his work has been alive to American and European poetry, to the verse forms of Japan, the geography of the United States. ‘Circle and District’, the long title poem of a recent collection, makes a journey on the London Tube an extraordinary adventure in meditation and recollecting the past. He has reminded us that we are citizens of the world while reminding us, too, that we belong to a part of it that is unique. A remark he made during an interview in 1996 puts it with the quiet power that is typical of him: ‘If you have a strong first world and a strong set of relationships then in some part of you, you are always free, you can walk the world because you know where you belong, you have some place to come back to.’

Ireland, as we know, is undergoing a trauma. For many years and decades we thought we were failures, denizens of a place that had given little to the planet with the exception of its great writers and poets. Heaney is always aware of the special richness of this tradition. He has the scrupulousness of James Joyce, the wry humour of Beckett, and the Yeatsian sense that there are times when a poet can somehow touch the DNA of an entire society and turn it into something beautiful. More even than that, there has been an integrity to the work that every reader recognises and responds to. With its values of love of language – of words and their musicality – and its insistence that the everyday is worthy of celebration, Heaney’s work has somehow come to belong to us all in Ireland. If we have a national poet, in any meaningful sense of the term, he is the only contender for the mantle.

And in these times of challenge and austerity, of recent dreams being smashed, as violently and as permanently as Eamon de Valera’s once were, Heaney speaks of an older and deeper set of priorities as well as being urgently contemporary. He has written often of the dignity of labour, of things of the hand, of those who sew and reap and hammer and harvest, no matter the madness of the world around them. He has roved through the kitchens of all our Irish childhoods, noticing and immortalising the women who haunt them and who speak of weather and children and the preparation of food as a way of speaking about something else.

My late father-in-law, John Casey, a man who left Roscommon in the 1950s to work on the building sites of Coventry and Manchester, loved only one poet, and it was Heaney. He saw him as a figure who had given a voice to a whole mass of Irish people often forgotten by literature. And it never surprised me that John would be sometimes so touched by a Heaney lyric that tears would appear in his tough eyes; for Heaney’s heroes, if he has them, have been the people whose principal inheritance has been their courage and precious little else. And he has written with a modesty and non-attention-seeking poise ordinary readers find exemplary and touching. We see in his work a kind of subtle transmission of many of the solidarities we used to think were important in Ireland. He doesn’t do chat-shows or celebrity photo-shoots. He sits at a desk and writes. A friend of mine who is an Irish novelist is fond of remarking that whenever he is invited to do something embarrassing to market one of his books, he asks himself ‘Would Seamus Heaney do it’ before responding. I think he’s only half-joking. Heaney has become a touchstone to a whole generation of younger Irish writers, and in some ways, I believe, to his readers.

In one of his most early and most frequently quoted poems, a youthful Seamus Heaney sees his father digging in a field that may or may not yield too much. He resolves that the pen is also a kind of tool, a way of getting down deep. ‘I’ll dig with it,’ he remarks. It was a noble manifesto. This is what he has succeeded in doing throughout a life in poetry. He has excavated what we are, found remnants of what we were, and somehow suggested with immense skill and beauty a notion of what we could be, and still might be. He has written that poetry can be redemptive. His own certainly is. That he is still, at the age of 70, making work of such extraordinary grace and relevance is a cause for celebration indeed.